A Comparative Analysis of Sri Lankan and Global Dual Citizenship Trends

Abstract

Introduction: An overview for dual citizenship In its basic sense, dual citizenship means holding simultaneous legal memberships (also called as citizenship) from two states. When a person holds two parallel citizenships, that person ideally has access to a full range of economic, political and social rights from both of these countries. In return, such a person is also expected to fulfil responsibilities and duties in both countries, such as paying taxes, obeying the laws and being loyal and patriotic. Traditionally, a citizen’s actual residency of a state is a key component to acquire legal citizenship rights. The most astonishing difference of dual citizenship and national citizenship is that dual citizenship separates legal attachment to a state from one’s actual residency, even though residency is a key element in national citizenship. Therefore, the ability to be entitled to receive rights and benefits as a dual citizen is regardless of the length of the stay or the actual residence in a country (Renshon 2001). Since dual citizenship challenges many of the principles of the national citizenship, it was historically disfavoured by states (Faist 2007b; Spiro 2017). National citizenship here, refers to the traditional belief by states that a person can become a citizen only in one state. The ability of citizens to attach and belong to two or more countries was not accepted in the national citizenship discourse. For example, until recent, many states who produced a large number of citizens emigrating to other states, were not worried too much about studying, staying in touch or maintaining records about such emigrants who left the home country. This is because the countries assumed that emigrants cannot be considered as loyal citizens anymore if they leave the country. Therefore, residency was considered as an important element of a citizen’s loyalty to a state. In migration, this residency requirement is arbitrarily challenged. If a citizen leaves to another country and decided to be a citizen of that host country, home country of the citizen 2 perceives it as a betrayal. It was not accepted that citizens can have multiple political loyalties (Faist 2007a). While home countries did not favour dual citizenship as they did not believe in migrants’ multiple attachments, many receiving countries did not historically agree with the dual citizenship idea as well (Kivisto & Faist 2010). Host countries’ general assumption was that immigrants cannot practically continue dual belongings and attachments. According to many host countries, if immigrants genuinely pursue the intention to become a part or a member of the host society, they have to detach from their previous home country to do so. In fact, many host countries consider withdrawing the citizenship of the home country as a pre-requisite for immigrants to be eligible to naturalize in the host country, putting immigrants into an “either/or” preposition to decide that either you are a citizen of your host country or in your home country (Bloemraad 2004). However, given the political and cultural globalisation in contemporary times, the frequency of people’s movements across states has increased immensely. According to Howard (2005), globalization led migrants to hold the sheer need of multiple attachments and identities with several countries. In this context, many countries, both home and host have identified that it is profitable to allow people to hold multiple attachments rather than restricting them. For example, a considerable portion of visitors coming to Sri Lanka for annual holidays are Sri Lankan dual citizens and their second generation children. These visitors bring a substantial amount of tourist income to Sri Lanka. In this sense, providing them with dual citizenship through which they can exercise their travel rights is more profitable to Sri Lanka economically, than restricting them. However, the decision to relax dual citizenship policies by many states is not only solely due to these types of monetary and other instrumental interests. The rise of human rights regime and the feminist movement also put pressure on states to acknowledge people’s multiple attachments (Kivisto & Faist 2010). For example, human rights discourse encouraged states to enable individuals’ access to basic rights considering him/herself as a human being instead of considering their affiliations with the states. Consequently, many states allow citizens to hold dual citizenships nowadays. Due to the quick boost in offering dual citizenship specifically since 1990, many scholars explored it both at a theoretical level as well as a policy level (Bauböck 2005; Escobar 2006; Koenig-Archibugi 2012; Mügge 2012; Ronkainen 2011; Sejersen 2008; Yanasmayan 2015). Looking at the 3 statistics, it is undoubted that the number of individuals becoming dual citizens are significantly increasing. For example, four to five million American citizens are estimated to be dual citizens while over a million French citizens are dual citizens as well (Howard 2005; Kivisto & Faist 2010). Therefore, it is fair to conclude that the interest to obtain dual citizenship by the people who have multiple attachments with two or more states is increasing while the enthusiasm of home countries to liberalise dual citizenship policies is also in an upward trend (Howard 2005; Kivisto & Faist 2010; Ragazzi 2014). Liberalization of dual citizenship policies in home countries are at different levels. Ragazzi (2014) has studied diaspora policies, including dual citizenship policies of 35 countries and has categorised those countries into five clusters. I use this categorization to understand the salient features of Sri Lankan dual citizenship policy as Sri Lanka’s single most prominent diaspora outreach policy. The first cluster is ‘expatriate states’ who have formed diaspora policies with a larger focus on cultural and educational policies. Examples to this category are France, UK and Spain. The second category is the ‘closed states’ who strongly regulate the mobility of their population and police it abroad. Examples are China, Cuba and North Korea. The third category is ‘global-nation states’ such as Mexico, Turkey and India. These countries have introduced a wide range of policies and rights in the benefit of their diaspora communities abroad. The fourth category is ‘managed labour states’. Policies of these countries are focused on investment schemes only. There are no other policies put in place towards emigrants in other fields except investing. For example, the countries that fall to this category do not pay attention on expanding welfare schemes to their returnees and populations living abroad. Their interest is more on what instrumental benefits they can receive by their emigrant populations. Countries such as Brazil, Philippines and Jordan fall into this category. The fifth category is ‘indifferent states’. These countries do not have much interest about its own population abroad. Lebanon, Belgium, Nigeria are some examples for this category. In the literature that many of the studies about home countries’ diaspora policies are based on qualitative, small-scale cases, Ragazzi’s (2014) study is an exception. The comparative analysis he offers, let the scholars who look at micro-level cases, to place such micro cases in a broader global diaspora policies map. I hence use Ragazzi’s (2014) categorization to place Sri Lankan micro case comparatively with other sending countries in the conclusion. According to this categorization, I argue that Sri Lanka falls into the ‘managed labour states’ category. Below, I explain the reasoning for my claim.